Return of the Native

I often wonder what Ella Raisin would think. What would she say about all these cars, their long touch screens, their wide wheels? How would she understand the scarcity of trees? Or the ubiquity of fidget toys and tattoos? How would she regard the Bay Bridge, connecting her Eastern Shore world to the Western Shore life? 

Of course, I never met my great great great grandmother, but still I wonder. Born in Talbot County in 1839, nearly 30 years before the end of slavery, what did she see everyday? How much of it was violence?  Tenderness? What fields did she stand in? Were they tobacco or cotton? Was she tall enough to see over them or was she short like my grandmother, her great great granddaughter? And was she even Black?

As a child, every summer, we would cross the bridge into the Eastern Shore. Then we’d drive the short stretch from the Bay Bridge to the tiny town of Oxford. As a child, I knew nothing about the history of the town. Only that my aunt and her family lived there. That she was raised by my great aunt who had lived in that house much longer. And that we were related to many of the families in the neighborhood.

Clara Mae Gibson was born in 1900 to her mother Helen Brummel, the daughter of Ella Raisin. What was Talbot County like for Clara Mae before she had my grandmother? Did she live in the Oxford house? Was the shoreline further back then? Maybe the beach was wider and filled with more shells in more colors. Maybe the town had only a few homes, no post office, no hotel, no restaurants, no museum. Maybe they only got around by foot or horse. Maybe most of the food they ate they grew or caught with their own hands. Even though I spent 18 loving years with my granny, Patricia Gibson, I never got to ask her any questions about her mother.

In one of my favorite Amiri Baraka poems, “Return of the Native,” he opens the poem saying: 

Harlem is vicious

modernism. BangClash.

Vicious the way it’s made.

Can you stand such beauty?

So violent and transforming.

The tree blink naked, being

So few. The women stare 

And are in love with them

selves. The sky sits awake 

over us. Screaming 

At us. No rain.

Sun, hot leaning sun

drives us under it. 

The poem begins as a critique of modernism and the enormous impact that machine has on nature and her progeny. It could even begin, “Baltimore is vicious/modernism,” because the area affected is any that has been impacted by colonialism. But Baraka does not silo beauty away from violence; instead he supposes that they are implicit to living. The sun is cruel in its high hanging beauty, reigning without the reprieve of rain. The trees are scarce and blinking absentia in their absentia. Modernism, it seems, if you look closely, is a constant witness to absence. 

Oxford, Maryland is one of the oldest towns in the entire state. For most of the 1600s, it was one of only two towns that were selected as ports of entry. By the time my grandmothers were growing up, Oxford was a bustling town on the railroad line. It offered oysters in plenty, gorgeous homes, thriving businesses, and all kinds of boaters. Over time, its Black population continued to grow. 

Long before I arrived, the number of Black families and property owners in Oxford significantly dwindled. By the time I got here, it was ongoing. Rumors of Kevin Bacon owning a house in Oxford was weird. But it was personally sad to witness the house across the street from my auntie–owned by her cousin–go into foreclosure. 

I even remember one summer, running into my old high school writing teacher at this restaurant my cousin works at on the wharf. 

What are you doing here? I thought. 

What are you doing here? She asked. 

My family’s from here. We’re visiting my auntie. I said, trying not to sound defensive.

Oh, my husband keeps his boat here. She said. 

His boat? I thought. Aren’t there closer places? places near where you live where he could keep his boat? 

If modernity is a witness to absence, or synonymously erasure, then how much of what we see is actually of here? Baraka’s poem interrogates the land question. Unravels the question of indigeneity. Proves that each probe on and on in a constant tussle with beauty and violence. 

Sites of colonial expansion, enslavement, and other atrocities of forced labor and coercive land dispossession are sites of deep trauma. Generationally, I carry a burden. It’s nowhere near the foreground with which Palestinians are suffering and witnessing genocide right now. But humming in the background of my every day, I can’t help but wonder, where am I? Why?

In the second stanza, Baraka writes:

The place, and place

meant of

black people. Their heavy Egypt. 

(Weird word!) Their minds, mine,

the black hope mine. In Time.

We slide along in pain or too

happy. So much love

for us. All over, so much of

what we need. Can you sing

yourself, your life, your place

on the warm planet earth.

And look at the stones

This stanza sings of place, personhood, and placelessness. Baraka equates the heaviness of erasure from nativity as a collective weight to carry. And in carrying it we also carry the knowledge, the hope, and the time of Blackness. He believes that there is enough of what we need. That homelessness is not a destination but a juncture from which we slide away from as we get closer to love which is self possession which is placeness. He believes we can imagine. And if we can imagine then we can create ourselves into the life and place that is naturally ours. But the journey towards this is not without complete acknowledgement of how we are postured–some of us in constant pain and others behind the mask of “too happy.” Either way, there is no onward without the wisdom of nature–the stones to which we must look.

90 miles. The distance between Oxford and Baltimore. Only 90 miles from where I can trace my matrilineal beginnings, yet sometimes I still feel so far from home. Like the place, and place meant for me is somewhere else or maybe even nowhere at all. 

Though my family’s lived in Baltimore City since the ’50s, only one person out of six aunts and six uncles, and 30-some first cousins owns a home in the city. The lack of ownership brings me back to the land question: why is it so structurally implausible for Black natives to own property in Baltimore? All of the home owners I know in this city are not from this city. Or they are not Black. How can I claim belonging without having a stable place to return? Some questions have no answers. Others have poems and Saida Hartman (nod nod, Lose your Mother) books to re-read. 

How Baraka ends the poem is where I want to end this loop of confusion re: dis/placement. In the last stanza, he celebrates what we share as a people moved and moving about the Earth. Notice here how his language shifts from the concrete to the abstract. As if to suggest that what is earth-based is a source to fuel the spirit. The spirit that anchors itself to belonging through the highways and byways of connection. Wiring itself through witnessing one another alongside our simultaneous witness of absence. 

the hearts the gentle hum

of meaning. Each thing, life 

we have, or love, is meant 

for us in a world like this.

Where we may see ourselves 

all the time. And suffer

in joy, that our lives 

are so familiar.